


I'm Sorry I Couldn't Save You

by CaptainJZH



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Cluster Emerges AU, Everybody Dies, Gen, I'm Sorry, Well at least everybody on Earth, mwahahahahaha, wait no I'm not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2018-11-08 19:01:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11087946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainJZH/pseuds/CaptainJZH
Summary: They failed. The Cluster emerges. Nobody survives.





	1. The Drill

“I don't know if it's going to hold!” Peridot cried out, the Cluster attempting to form beneath her.

Glowing light began to shine all around the Drill.

“What’s happening?!” Steven screamed.

“It's forming!” Peridot exclaimed, “We’re running out of power!”

The electronics in the drill flickered on and off.

“Rerouting from auxiliary!” Peridot said.

Suddenly, the drill was grabbed by a mass of glowing, semi-formed hands, shaking the two Crystal Gems violently.

“C’mon…c’mon…” Peridot said, frantically punching buttons.

The pod was slammed onto the surface of the Cluster, held down by the rapidly-forming mass around them.

“Systems are failing,” Peridot said, dents beginning to appear in the hull as the Cluster’s physical form took shape around them.

Peridot took one hard look at the gauges on the control panel. Fuel was dropping into the red. Pressure levels were quickly approaching safety limits. They were out of time.

“I’m aborting. We need to get out of here.”

Peridot pressed more buttons, many of which weren't working anymore.

“What about the Cluster?!” Steven asked, looking around in terror.

“I don't know.”

“What?!”

“I don't know, Steven!” Peridot shouted just as the whole control panel short-circuited. All the gauges dropped to zero. All power was lost.

The light around the pod got brighter and brighter. The hull began to collapse inward. Steven instinctively formed a bubble around them, pressing up against the walls that were rapidly closing in.

“We were so close…” Peridot said, tears forming in her eyes. She stared out the window, frozen in place.

Steven embraced Peridot in a hug.

The lights emanating from the Cluster grew more and more brilliant. The mass around the pod grew more and more dense. The pink bubble containing the two Crystal Gems shrank smaller and smaller as the pressure increased.

Eventually, the light turned into physical matter, and the bubble was instantly destroyed, no more difficult to the Cluster than the act of a human popping a balloon.


	2. The Crystal Gems

The earthquakes had calmed down for a bit after the Watermelon Steven reverted to its natural state. The three Crystal Gems (with Lapis’ comatose body in tow) swam for several hours to reach the nearest shore.

“How far to the nearest warp pad?” Amethyst asked, wringing the water out of her hair.

“Two hours by running,” Garnet said, holding Lapis in her arms.

Before Amethyst could respond, the ground began to shake.

“Peridot didn’t say anything about a second round of tremors!” Pearl shouted over the rumbling.

“Let’s move!” Garnet said as cracks began to form in the ground.

Suddenly, the beach was split apart by a large chasm, knocking the Gems off their feet. Lapis fell out of Garnet’s hands and fell into the abyss.

Nearby trees collapsed to the ground. Flocks of birds squawked and flew off, and various other animals scurried in all directions.

The Gems lept into the air, soaring over the chasms forming beneath them.

\---

“Shouldn't it have stopped by now?!” Amethyst asked exhaustedly as they jumped from collapsing column of rock to collapsing column of rock.

“Something's gone wrong,” Garnet said as they touched down in a relatively stable spot to catch their breath.

Suddenly, a bright light blinded the group, followef by a deafening explosion-like sound. A powerful shockwave then blew past, knocking all three several yards back.

A noise began to fill the air as the Gems regained their bearings. The noise was of screaming. Millions of anguished voices screaming. Garnet recognized it immediately from the fusion experiments, but this was on a MUCH larger scale.

Fighting the force of the winds kicked up by the blast, they slowly looked up, seeing the ground ahead of them crack apart before their very eyes.

Garnet wiped away her shades as she looked up at the sky, seeing a massive column of light rising from beyond the horizon.

“The Cluster…” Garnet said, freezing in place.

Light began to pour out from under the cracks in the earth as well, but Garnet stood firmly in place, unsure of what to do.

“Steven… Peridot…” Pearl gasped.

“NO!” Amethyst cried out, summoning her whip and running towards the blinding light, “THEY CAN’T BE-!”

Pearl grabbed her just as the ground in front of them completely gave way, columns of light surrounding the quickly-destabilizing plot of land they had stopped on.

“I thought we had a chance!” Amethyst said between sobs.

“I did too…” Pearl said, tearfully looking up at the sky.

Garnet fell apart into Ruby and Sapphire.

“I… I saw…” Sapphire stammered.

Ruby took Sapphire’s hand, turning her head away from the tower of light looming over them. They hugged, tears pouring down their cheeks. The pair then felt two others hugging them: Pearl and Amethyst.

“We failed,” they all thought just as the light deteriorated the ground beneath them.

“We’re sorry, Steven…”

As the Cluster’s form shot up from deep within the Earth’s crust, it pulverized everything, and everyone, in its path, leaving nothing behind but mere dust.


	3. Lapis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, this fic hasn't been updated in...wow, over a year? Well I planned on writing more, but I had two chapters already written way back when and I figured I might as well post them!

Her face slammed against a rock. The impact had enough force that it snapped her out of her coma and woke her with a jolt.

 

Lapis was falling. Falling deep into a seemingly bottomless abyss. She summoned her wings and stopped midair, heavily breathing.

 

The last thing she could remember was being inside Malachite, just before that giant Crystal Gem fusion had blown her and Jasper apart.

 

Looking down, she could see a faint light within the darkness of the chasm. It was getting brighter. The walls of the chasm where starting to close in on her.

 

Lapis shot upward at the fastest speed she could muster. She didn't know what was going on, but she knew she had to get out of there.

 

Tons of rocks and soil appeared to fall from the sky above. Lapis did her best to dodge the debris, just barely avoiding being hit and forced back into the darkness.

 

Eventually, she emerged from the abyss and soared into the sky. From there, she got a good look at the destruction that was plaguing the Earth’s surface. Huge cracks riddled the entire region. Whole towns were collapsing into rubble.

 

Suddenly, a huge explosion was heard in the distance. From her altitude, Lapis could see a bright light far on the horizon. Before she could realize what it was, a shock-wave hit her and practically knocked her out of the sky.

 

Lapis fell into the ocean just off the shoreline. The water was quickly flowing into the hundreds of chasms forming below, causing enormous air bubbles to float to the surface. 

 

Even though months under the sea had traumatized her, Lapis quickly regained her bearings and turned towards the shore. The light on the horizon was getting brighter, and it was accompanied by a chorus of a million screams. The rumbling of the Earth’s crust had turned into violent shaking. Lapis instinctively shot out of the sea, using it to propel her even faster away from the approaching light.

 

As she frantically soared into the upper atmosphere, her mind began to wander. Her first thought was about Steven; Where he was, if he was okay, etc. She hadn't seen him since that apparition she had seen while fused with Jasper.

 

Then, interrupting her train of thought, an impossibly tall spire of light and screams burst out of the Earth in front of her. Lapis stopped before she flew right into it.

 

She could only stare at the... _ monstrosity _ that stood before her, growing in size every second. Lapis then realized that it wasn't just light: It had ARMS. And legs, and torsos, and almost faces that tried to form but glitched back into extremities after screeching in pain.

 

Lapis looked down and saw light pouring out of every crack on the Earth’s surface, which was quickly failing to hold back whatever was forming down below.

 

Then, in one brief moment, the entire crust finally gave way and the light expanded at ultrasonic speeds. Whatever was left of the Earth’s cities and infrastructure was caught up in the forming behemoth.

 

Lapis, acting solely on instinct, flew as fast as her wings could take her, away from the rapidly-advancing screaming light. She focused solely on the stars in front of her. They seemed so close, and yet so very far away. She didn’t think at all of what to do after she got away; Just that she had to get away from whatever was emerging from the Earth, and she had to get away from it NOW.

 

Unfortunately, after months trapped in a fusion battling Jasper, Lapis just couldn’t fly at the speeds she had been able to manage for her initial trip back to Homeworld. As she broke free of what used to be the Earth’s atmosphere, she noticed that the light was gaining on her, and the screams were getting louder and louder.

 

She was out of time.

 

A hand grabbed Lapis by the leg. She was stopped dead in her tracks. She tried to break free. The hand, which split into multiple hands, pulled her into the light, which enveloped her with ease.

 

She was trapped.


	4. The Roaming Eye

Doc sat in her command chair as the Roaming Eye’s autopilot flew it to the Crystal System at faster-than-light speeds.

 

“4ND!” she shouted out, “What’s our ETA?”

 

“We should be entering the Crystal System now,” Eyeball said.

 

“Drop to light speed,” Doc ordered.

 

“Dropping to light speed.”

 

“Plotting manual course for Earth!” Navy said from her station.

 

“Good,” Doc said, taking the controls.

 

They were under direct orders from Yellow Diamond: Retrieve Jasper, the leader of the Earth mission, before the Cluster was due to emerge. According to the orders, Jasper’s last reported coordinates was off a small peninsula on the northwestern continent, and was last reported in the company of a Lapis Lazuli and a Peridot. So, Doc figured, if they went to that region and scanned for a Jasper, a Lapis, or a Peridot, they would at least get somewhere.

 

“ETA is one minute,” Eyeball said.

 

“5NE,” Doc said, turning to Leggy, “Prepare a wide-range Gem Scan for Jaspers, Lapis Lazulis, and Peridots.”

 

“Oh, yes, yes, of course…” Leggy said, “I-I’ll get right on that.”

 

“6MC,” Doc told Army, “The reports said something about rogue Gem activity-”

 

“I’ll pound them into dust!”

 

Doc was about to say something against that, but decided to just say, “You do that.”

 

As Leggy nervously prepared the Gem-detection program, she struck up a conversation with the Ruby next to her: Eyeball.

 

“S-so,” Leggy began. “Can’t wait to meet Jasper, huh?”

 

A tiny smile formed on Eyeball’s face.

 

“Yeah,” Eyeball said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

 

“I don’t get what the big deal about her is.”

 

“YOU DON’T KNOW???” Eyeball asked loudly, drawing the attention of all the other Rubies. She quieted down and turned to Leggy.

 

“Jasper is one of the biggest heroes of Era 1! They say she could have won the entire war single-handedly, with her eyes closed, and would still be ready for more. The Facet 9 Kindergarten Quartz That Could. That’s what the big deal is.”

 

A warning appeared on Eyeball’s console.

 

“Approaching Earth orbit,” she called out.

 

“Dropping to sublight,” Doc said.

 

Suddenly, the ship was hit with a barrage of rocks and miscellaneous debris.

 

“What the-? Check our coordinates!” Doc shouted.

 

“The star maps didn’t say anything about an asteroid field!” Eyeball said in her defense.

 

“I didn’t mean that!” Doc bellowed before pointing up at the window, “I meant THAT! Where’s the Earth?!”

 

Eyeball frantically went back to her console and began checking and rechecking their coordinates.

 

“This should be it,” Eyeball said, “I don’t-”

 

“Hey,” Leggy interjected awkwardly, “Uh, you all might wanna see this.”

 

The four other Rubies gathered around Leggy’s console. Her initial Gem Scan tests had just reflected back and the readings were practically nonsense.

 

“If I’m reading this right, we’re detecting over a million irregular Gems in this system!” Doc said.

 

“That's impossible,” Army interjected, “The scans only have a radius of-”

 

Another warning went off, this time on Doc’s console.

 

“Proximity alert!” Doc exclaimed.

 

Before they could act, the ship was hit violently, knocking all the Rubies off their feet. 

 

The lights darkened to a dim red, and various alarms began going off.

 

“Man your stations!” Doc shouted as the ship was hit once again.

 

“Hull integrity dropping!” Leggy cried out from her station.

 

“Emergency depressurization procedures!” Doc said as she climbed back into her seat, “I’m bringing us about, maximum reverse sublight.”

 

Bright red force-fields came down over each station, just before the ship was hit yet again by an unknown force.

 

Doc steered the Roaming Eye around 180 degrees, but didn't look up at the viewscreen until Eyeball looked and gasped.

 

Directly in front of them was an extraordinarily ginormous, multicolored, multi-limbed monstrosity. Its body was over a hundred times the size of a planet, the gem (if you could even call it a gem) placed at its very center.

 

“What is that?!” Leggy asked in terror.

 

“The Cluster…” Doc muttered to herself.

 

“That means Jasper…” Eyeball started to say, becoming increasingly distraught.

 

One of the Cluster’s appendages reached out at them once again, intending to strike.

 

“Retreat! Maximum speed!” Doc called out as she slammed her hand on the controls and put the ship into full reverse.

 

The Cluster disappeared as the gravity engine blasted them out of the Crystal System entirely. The lights went back to normal and the red pillars disappeared.

 

“Pressurization restored,” Navy said from her station.

 

Doc looked down at her feet. She stood up.

 

“4ND,” she began, “Prepare a priority message for Yellow Diamond. State that we entered the Crystal System at 1100 hours, and upon reaching the Earth's coordinates…”

 

Doc wiped away a tear forming underneath her visor.

 

“We found...we found that the planet was destroyed. No survivors. The Cluster… The Cluster has emerged.”

 

The message was sent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Aaaaaand that's the end of another day; It was mighty serious I'd have to say! The Cluster Gems looked pretty cool when they made the planet Earth explo- AAAH THEY'RE IN MY EYES AGAIN!" *star-iris out*


End file.
